Comment by geokon | Hacker News Reader

Comment by geokon | Hacker News Reader

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a bit of a noob question. I'd love to be able to tweak code on the spot. Like I'm showing something to my boss and he wants something quickly adjusted, I write a couple lines, commit and then with Github Actions I get back an updated executable immediately

But I feel like things are set up explicitly to not work this way. Maybe I'm doing something wrong but can you trigger a rebuild of a prerelease?

It seems you need to setup a new tag and a new release version to ever get a rebuild. There are explicitly no official Actions for updating releases. A new release for a one line change seems a bit crazy (and you'll get a huge clutter of releases which is confusing for users)

I tried to ask and was told it's maybe possible if you write an action yourself .. yikes https://github.community/t5/GitHub-Actions/What-s-the-canoni...

You can set up your actions to build an executable for each commit on the master branch, it will be available as an artifact in the actions tab. This is useful if you want to test your built code.

Generally speaking, you shouldn't modify existing releases, since somebody may have downloaded them and he will have no way of knowing you have improved them.

I guess you're right. That this is the expected workflow. The way the UI by default dumps Prereleases and Releases together (with very small faint font to distinguish them) in the same tab called "Releases" is an issue so I sorta understand why you feel it'd be confusing. The UI is no good, but this is not an insurmountable problem

It's true you can have a latest artifact.. I will try using that - but I can't email a colleague and tell him/her to download an artifact. There is no "latest build action artifact" page and there is so much extraneous information that if they've never used github you'd need to attach an explanation of where to click.

I didn't feel my use-case was particularly unusual, but I guess it's doesn't fit Github's model.

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